The present invention is related to robotic control systems, and more particularly to automated fabrication systems. It is also best viewed in light of the art of chemistry, computer software, natural language processing, and CNC manufacturing.
Stereo lithography and other 3-D printing techniques are becoming increasingly popular. Material science is in its infancy. If chemistry experimentation were more accessible to a wider audience, many more new compounds could be developed, from green, environmentally-friendly chemical processes for plastics that do not require fossil fuels as inputs, to custom nano-coatings that reduce heat transfer on windows or consumer electronics. While there are a number of automatic assays (U.S. Pat. No. 5,473,706 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,120,733) and laboratory experiment automation devices (U.S. Pat. No. 6,999,607 and U.S. Pat. No. 7,470,541), particularly in biology, no general purpose method or apparatus in the prior art is flexible, portable, and cheap enough to produce new custom parts for aircraft or life-saving medicine in the average consumer's home, or in an RV, or military vehicle, in a fully automated fashion. Furthermore, such systems typically require specific instructions designed for that particular system or family of systems to generate a particular type of compound, with a very limited set of operations supported (U.S. Pat. No. 4,668,476). One cannot simply take a device used to make aspirin, and use it to make bullet-proof plastic instead, or even most other common drugs, without human intervention.
Likewise, 3-D printing technology and stereolithography techniques (U.S. Pat. No. 7,037,382 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,779,967) only operate with a very limited range of materials, typically custom plastics, woods, or metals with specifically designed bonding properties, that must be the only combination of materials used by the 3-D printing device. There is also no opportunity to further react or modify these materials in the process of 3-D printing, after they have been bonded to the rest of the output object. What is needed is a way to manipulate the materials in a 3-D printing process even after they have been bound to the object being created, to allow for a greater range of materials, the application of coatings, wiring, transistor structures, and other enhancements necessary to create electronics, custom optics, new chemical compounds, and other objects that today's 3-D printing technology and automated chemical process equipment cannot make.